The 1st Time The Original Members Of Umphrey’s McGee Performed Together Publicly

Last week, Umphrey’s McGee marked 26 years since the four original members of the band first performed together under the band name. The January 21, 1998 concert at Bridget McGuire’s Filling Station in South Bend, Indiana was not the first time guitarist Brendan Bayliss, bassist Ryan Stasik, keyboardist Joel Cummins and drummer Mike Mirro performed in public together, which occurred several months earlier on the campus of the University of Notre Dame where the four musicians were enrolled as students.

On November 2, 1997, Cummins staged a concert at Annenberg Auditorium that was part of his studies at Notre Dame. The recital-like performance concluded with Cummins playing an improvisational sequence while accompanied by other musicians. The musicians who played with Cummins included Stasik, Bayliss and Mirro (as well as guitarist Brendan Mowery).

The improvised segment developed into a passage that became one of Umphrey’s McGee’s early original songs, the instrumental “Dear Lord.”

Mirro left Umphrey’s Mcgee at the end of 2002 and sadly died on this date 10 years ago. Back on November 2, 2017, UM made note of the 20th anniversary of the first time Mirro, Cummins, Stasik and Bayliss performed in public together and busted out the now rarely played “Dear Lord.”

“‘Dear Lord’ just began as a Ryan Stasik bass riff that we played over,” Cummins told JamBase in 2017. “The old I/IV major chord progression was a good start.”

Cummins further described the first time the OG UM members played one of their songs on an episode of the Bottom Of The Bill podcast. Cummins recalled:

“November 2nd of 1997 is the first time that the original four members played together in front of an audience. I’m not going to call it a recital, but it was a performance that was part of my credit [at] Notre Dame. I did one set of just solo piano material and the second set that I did was people coming up and it was all improvisation.

“It started out with a couple of different people. I think that the show basically ended with about 15 or 20 minutes of the original members of Umphrey’s. We played a little jam called ‘Dear Lord’ that we sometimes still play.”

At the time of Cummins’ non-recital-recital, he and Mirro were in a band together called Stomper Bob. Bayliss and Stasik were in a different ND band with the Star Wars-inspired name Tashi Station. The collaboration facilitated by Cummins turned out to the be the seed that sprouted Umphrey’s McGee, as the keyboardist detailed on the Bottom of the Bill podcast:

“Probably about two weeks after [the recital], [Bayliss and Stasik] told us they wanted to get together for dinner,” Cummins explained. “We went to this place called the Mishawaka Brewing Company which had pretty decent burritos and insanely cheap pitchers on Tuesday nights … Everyone had wicked hangovers on Wednesdays all the time.

“Mike and I went out to dinner with them and they were like, ‘We’ll quit our band if you guys quit yours, we feel like you guys wanna keep playing music after college. We do too and our bandmates don’t … We were, of course, like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this!’”

We kind of talked about what kind of music we wanted to make and what music that we liked, and we all listened to. We knew some of this because we’d hung out and had late night drunken jams in each other’s basements over the past year leading up to this.

But yeah, that was kind of when we made the call and then Mike and I went home and told our bass player – I also lived with our bass player of our other band, which, that was not ideal. We went home and told him, ‘We’re done with this band. We’re starting this other thing.’ All of the band members were cool – except for that one guy that I lived with.

We went over to Brendan’s place the next day and we’re like, ‘All right, we did it! We quit!’ And they were like, ‘Oh, shit, you guys actually did it! All right, we’ll call our guys right now.

Then we basically just wrote music and rehearsed for all of December of 1997 and the first part of January of [‘98] and then played our first show, January 21st, 1998. The secret to our early success was this: we had four members in the original band and we were all in different classes at Notre Dame. I was the oldest, Brendan second oldest, Ryan third oldest, and Mike fourth … it was great because we all different groups of friends and immediately it was like, oh, we played a show and 150 people showed up.”

A brief excerpt of the improvisational jam that incorporated “Dear Lord” at Cummins’ concert in 1997 featuring Stasik, Bayliss and Cummins can be heard below:

Scroll down to watch an excerpt of Cummins’ appearance on the Bottom Of The Bill podcast discussing the early stages of UM and view a previously shared tribute to Mirro posted by his former UM bandmates:

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Donate to the Michael A. Mirro Neuroscience Fund

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